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Kimball Brook raises several dozen pigs every year, fed partly with the abundance of skim left after whole milk is separated to create cream for customers such as Lake Champlain Chocolates, Red Kite Candy and Scout & Company who use it in candy and ice cream.

The on-farm dinners, milk-fed pork, wholesale cream business and branded line of flavored milks are all pieces in the puzzle of building a successful Vermont dairy farming business, explained Cheryl DeVos, who runs the operation with her husband, J.D. DeVos.

Sitting in the shade waiting for dinner guests to arrive, Cheryl DeVos, 52, explained that the new summer series of monthly on-farm Sunday dinners are not revenue-generators, but are more about marketing and community outreach.

"They are a good way to bring the public onto the farm to see how it all works," she said.

Kimball Brook Farm in North Ferrisburgh is hosting a series of on-farm dinners. The last, on July 12, was a pig roast.(Photo: MONICA DONOVAN/ for the FREE PRESS)

Back to the farm

Diversification is not new to Kimball Brook Farm, which has been in the DeVos family since 1968.

Dairy farms that ship milk as a commodity product have no control over the price they receive, which changes monthly based on complex regional and national dynamics.

To supplement erratic milk checks over the years, J.D.'s dad, John DeVos, had built a trucking business for which his son was working in 1998.

"We had young kids and we were living at the edge of the farm," J.D. DeVos, 51, said. "I was driving all the time and I wanted to be home more, so we decided to do some figuring to see what it would take to make a go of it."

Like most Vermont dairy farms, Kimball Brook's milk was shipped to central processing plants and pooled with milk of many other farms to become bottled milk or other dairy products.

The couple increased the size of the herd to about 200 and built a new milking parlor and barns for improved efficiency, but fluctuating milk prices continued to challenge their bottom line over the next few years.

"You're still kind of beating your head against the wall," said J.D. DeVos.

Keith Mills, left, and Tom Kennett tend to the pig roast during the Sunday Dinner at the Farm series at Kimball Brook Farm in North Ferrisburgh, July 12.(Photo: MONICA DONOVAN/ for the FREE PRESS)

Changes

"Then unbeknownst to me," he continued with a grin, "Cheryl went to a NOFA [Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont] meeting and comes home with this brilliant idea to go organic."

"We've never been afraid of change," said J.D. DeVos "but I told her, 'You need to show me how it will work financially.' She did a lot of work on that."

As with conventional milk, organic pricing is controlled by a market-driven base price set annually versus monthly. While it is higher than the non-organic price, expenses for organic operations are also generally higher and milk yield per cow lower.

"The financial part is important. You get a steady check," J.D. DeVos continued. "We were originally driven by economics but the more we got into it, the more it made sense for a lot of reasons, like the sustainability of it. You're not dumping all sorts of stuff in the ground."

"Some years," he noted wryly, "that works better than others."

Kimball Brook has been certified organic since May of 2005.

"We needed to do something different," his wife added. "Ever since we've gone organic, I feel pretty strongly that what we do is good for the planet. We don't use herbicides or pesticides, no commercial fertilizers on the fields. And with our cows, we don't use antibiotics and no growth or reproductive hormones."

Their herd is out on pasture a good part of the year, moving regularly among 250 acres in a rotational grazing system designed for optimal animal nutrition and care of the land.

"We kind of went back to the way we were doing it when I was a kid," J.D. DeVos said. "In the summertime, the cows are pretty much only in the barn to be milked."

The farm raises most of its own winter feed organically on about 650 acres of owned and leased land in order to minimize the amount of expensive organic grain they need to purchase.

After they found it hard to source organically raised replacement heifers to bring into their milking herd, the Devoses bought another farm and are now running a separate organic heifer operation.

Organic dairy cows pictured at Kimball Brook Farm in North Ferrisburgh. The farm has diversified by bottling its own milk and offering flavored milks.(Photo: MONICA DONOVAN/ for the FREE PRESS)

More control — and fun

But organic pricing is not a magic bullet, the Devoses learned. In 2008 and 2009 organic milk prices fell as organic grain prices rose.

"We started talking about other ways to make it work financially," said Cheryl DeVos. The idea of launching the farm's own line of bottled organic milks and cream bubbled up as a way to have more control over product pricing.

In addition to various fat levels of milk and cream, flavored milks, she explained, were both an obvious way to capture more shelf space (chocolate and maple, flavored with organic syrup from Shaker Maple Farm in Starksboro) and a response to the trend of coffee dairy drinks (the iced cappuccino line).

They're also fun. "I like to experiment," Cheryl DeVos said. "That's the most fun for me."

Kimball Brook worked with the Vermont Farm Viability Program on its business plan. With the support of some Slow Money investors, the DeVoses raised over half a million dollars and secured additional bank loans for a total of $1.2 million to renovate the former Saputo cheese plant in Hinesburg where, coincidentally, the farm's milk had been shipped years before.

The 15,000-square-foot facility bottles milk and cream three days a week, processing all shipments to order into both plastic and glass bottles. Across both farm and creamery, Kimball Brook employs about 15 full- and part-time.

In just over three years, the business has achieved broad regional distribution from co-ops and independents to big supermarket chains such as Price Chopper and Whole Foods Market, although, Cheryl DeVos said, there's still a lot of growth potential.

She's working hard on expanding Kimball Brook sales in the New York City market and on other dairy products such as butter and also a line of iced teas, which will make use of the equipment when it's not bottling dairy.

There are many challenges ahead, she said, but the good news is that, "People want to know where their food comes from."

Guests help themselves to food during the Sunday Dinner at the Farm series at Kimball Brook Farm in North Ferrisburgh.(Photo: Monica Donovan/ for the Free Press)

Bringing it full circle

Among the 50 or so guests at the July on-farm dinner were Heidi and Ben Lessard who had come to the meal from their home across the road for exactly this reason.

"We are interested in real food and supporting the community," said Heidi Lessard as she sipped a frosty pint of iced cappuccino milk. "We buy their milk and we appreciate that we have a farm as a neighbor. We came just to support them and be neighborly."

The 200-pound, milk-fed pig was ready to be carved, judged pit-master Keith Mills of Rochester. "I had a little piece and it tasted good to me," he said.

Local musicians, the Red Clover Trio, entertained the crowd as Kimball Brook's recently hired farm manager, Tom Kennett, carved up the pork and his wife, Jennifer Kennett, and Cheryl DeVos carried out a feast of homemade side dishes.

Diners headed to the beverage table where two of the four Kennett children were handing out Kimball Brook milk.

After everyone indulged in squares of coconut cream pound cake baked by a Kennett family friend, J.D. DeVos led a tour into the milking parlor where the evening milking was underway.

The next morning, he'd be at the Hinesburg creamery processing that milk into Kimball Brook bottled products.

John and Sue DeVos, their son J.D. and his wife, Cheryl DeVos (front) of Kimball Brook Farm have recently brought on Jennifer and Tom Kennett (back), with their children, twins Tucker and Calvin, 12, Wyatt, 6, and Amelia, 8.(Photo: MONICA DONOVAN/ for the FREE PRESS)

Next steps

The needs of the creamery side of their business motivated the Devoses to look for a farm manager who they hope might become a business partner, marking the next evolution of Kimball Brook Farm.

Although one of Cheryl and J.D. Devoss two grown children, Hilary, 25, works on the farm — and arrived at dinner after baling hay all morning — there is not yet a next-generation family member ready to take over any part of the farm's operation. (Cheryl has two other children from a previous marriage.)

Tom Kennett will manage the 400-animal dairy and replacement heifer operations, leaving the DeVoses more time to focus on other critical aspects of the business including production and bottling, as well as marketing, sales and product development.

"It's hard to be the dairy farmer and the processor and the marketer at the same time," said Tom Kennett, 38, who grew up on his family's dairy farm in Rochester, and said he and his wife are very happy to join Kimball Brook Farm.

"It's pretty neat to see people pull your product off the shelf in the local grocery store right in front of you," Jennifer Kennett said.

"When you see Kimball Brook on the shelf, you know it's all your milk and there's a pride in that," Tom Kennett elaborated. "We're going to take care of the land and take care of the cow and the milk's going to go right to the consumer."

Keith Mills of Rochester tends to the pig roast during the Sunday Dinner at the Farm series at Kimball Brook Farm in North Ferrisburgh, July 12.(Photo: MONICA DONOVAN/ for the FREE PRESS)

How to Make Butter from Heavy Cream

Adapted from Kimball Brook Farm blog at www.kimballbrookfarm.com

1. Fill a pint-size mason jar halfway full with heavy cream (preferably organic, not ultra-pasteurized and starting with room temperature cream helps speed up the process). Secure the lid tightly and start shaking. Shake, shake, shake! Soon you will feel a glob start to form in the jar and the excess liquid will be very thin and watery.

2. Shake a bit more, then open the jar and pour the buttermilk off for another use.

3. Add a bit of cold water, close the lid and shake a little bit more. Pour that liquid down the drain.

4. Shake the butter glob into a small bowl. With a rubber spatula, press all the liquid out of the butter and pour off. Keep pressing and pouring off till there is no more liquid coming out.

5. Now you have butter. Add a little salt if you like. Spread some right on a cracker or bread and enjoy!

6. Or make compound butter if you wish. A favorite recently has been to fold in roasted garlic and finely chopped sage, rosemary and thyme. For a sweet butter, fold in maple syrup, honey or cinnamon and sugar. An all-time favorite is maple and bacon butter. What could be better on pancakes?

Food processor method: If you don't want to shake, you can pour some cream into a food processor and process for about 3 to 5 minutes until it forms a glob. Pour off the buttermilk, add fresh water, process again and then discard the liquid. Proceed per above with step number 4.